Alabama

Cariglino, Women's Business Center Founder: It's time to leave

Kathryn Cariglino poses for a photo in her offices at the Women's Business Center Inc., Aug. 8, 2012 in Mobile, Ala. Cariglino, the founder of Women's Business Center Inc., is retiring after nearly 20 years with the nonprofit. (Press-Register, G.M. Andrews)

MOBILE, Alabama -- Kathryn Cariglino has made her living by helping other women succeed.

The founder of the nonprofit Women's Business Center Inc., which offers free counseling services to women business owners, Cariglino has helped hundreds achieve their dreams of running a business.

Now after nearly 20 years with the center, Cariglino will retire.

"I never intended to stay in this arena this long," she said. "I want to step away at a time that we have grown and we are strong. I want to step away and let the Women's Business Center move to the next level."

There are more than 110 Women's Business Centers across the country, including four in Alabama. Like centers nationwide, the Mobile location helps women with the nuts and bolts of running a business, including promotion, networking and figuring expenses.

"I feel like a parent whose child has reached adolescence and I think it's time for the parent to let the child go and become its own self," she said of her work with the center.

"It's not been an easy road. It's time for me to have enough energy to maybe do another business, write the book I've been talking about for a number of years or use some of my knowledge in a different way."

The road to success wasn't always easy for Cariglino. Raised by a family of entrepreneurs, she said she was around business her whole life, but was never encouraged to try it herself.

"I was encouraged to go to college," she said. "I was the first one in my family to get a college degree, then I became a teacher. It was practical."

But after 10 years teaching second grade at several area Catholic schools, Cariglino decided she wanted to try something different.

Retiring from teaching in 1985, Cariglino went to work for her husband's insurance agency, then for a health maintenance organization as a consumer affairs representative. The HMO office closed after she'd been there for 18 months.

"I was unemployed and on unemployment for the first time in my life," she said. "But I used that as an opportunity to go back to the idea of starting my own business."

Cariglino said she began to think about what she really cared about and what she could do.

She said her real passion was doing something for women in Mobile. While mentioning her idea to one of her sisters -- she's the oldest of five siblings -- her sister suggested she open her own Women's Yellow Pages.

"There was this whole movement of women's directories in the country in the bigger cities," Cariglino said. "It looked like a way to bring women together, be of service and make money. Of course, I didn't know anything about selling advertisements, printing or publishing, but, like the women we counsel at the center, I just went for it."

Cariglino said she first went to her father with the news that she wanted to start her own business.

"He looked at me and he said, 'Honey, get a job.' I was crushed," she said. "But it was the door for me to really have the next phase of my life."

Cariglino forged ahead with her business plan and in 1988, started the Women's Yellow Pages in Mobile. Shortly after, she teamed with the Small Business Development Center to put on a women-in-business trade fair and attract customers for the yellow pages. But Cariglino soon found that women in business were looking for guidance rather than advertisement.

"I'd go in to make a sales call and they would just tell me their issues and I would offer them information," she said. "They were isolated, thinking they were the only one having whatever particular problem they were having at the time. What happened was I became a business counselor."

Though delighted she could help women with their business issues, Cariglino said she wasn't selling much advertisement and therefore wasn't making any money. One of her mentors in the yellow pages business mentioned that it sounded like she was running a women's business center, a comment that sparked the idea for an organization that Cariglino would oversee for the next 20 years.

In 1992, Cariglino wrote her first grant to the U.S. Small Business Administration to request money for a women's business center in Mobile.

"Much to my surprise, they said yes," she said. "In fact, I was shocked."

The Women's Business Center of South Alabama formed in 1993 as the Women's Business Assistance Center. As the program evolved, Cariglino said, the center became her predominant work. She dissolved the Women's Yellow Pages and brought it under the center as a nonprofit, renaming it Women's Biz.

Though supported by a grant from the SBA for a number of years, the center graduated out of the program in 1999 and was ineligible to apply for funds, she said. The Mobile center then changed its name to its current title and continued to seek funding from public and private sources.

Cariglino said her greatest achievement is making women in Mobile aware that they're part of something that's national.

"That's the legacy I'd like to leave for women in business," she said. "There is absolutely no reason why they need to feel isolated and feel that they need to go out there and make all the mistakes alone. We're not going to say to them, 'Go get a job' like my dad. We say, 'OK, you can do it, but let's think about it first.'"

Cariglino's last day is Sept. 30, and she said the center's board is actively seeking and interviewing a replacement, and is fully capable of carrying on the work without her.

"Because I brought the concept to Mobile first, there is now a women's business center in Huntsville, Birmingham and two operated out of Mobile," she said. "I never made that $1 million I thought I was going to make, but it's been OK because I got $1 million worth of experience. Who knows what the next chapter is going to be."